Vaterland

«Vaterland» is a drama directed by Pawel Pawlikowski starring Sandra Hüller, Anna Madeley and August Diehl. After the end of the Second World War, Nobel laureate Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) travels with his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), an actress, writer and cabaret artist, through a Germany in ruins, from Frankfurt in the American occupation zone to Soviet-controlled Weimar. It is his first return to the country he once fled into exile, and for the Goethe anniversary people on both sides of the inner-German border court and sometimes revile Germany's most important writer in hope of words of comfort and forgiveness. As the writer is fussed over by euphoric Wagner heirs and literary generals, the drama of his own family quietly escalates, and the journey into the wounded German soul becomes one into its innermost core for Erika and the magician, as his children often called him.